Who do I have to sleep with to get a drip coffee maker that lasts?

Writers need coffee more than they need a muse.

Drip coffee makers make that coffee fairly quickly with a minimum* of hands-on labor. The trouble is, they don't last.

I discovered several years ago that $70 to $90 coffee makers don't last any longer than the inexpensive brands. This discovery occurred about the same time I wised up and noticed that $70 - $90 sneakers fall apart just as fast as $20 sneakers.

Our Proctor Silex PS Auto Pause Coffee Maker came into the house on January 20th. The day was sunny and cool and there were no ominous omens, portents or other warnings present near the Family Dollar store on Washington Street or in our neighborhood.

According to the appliance maker's web site, Proctor Silex (a Hamilton Beach Brand) products are tested and proven. I would think so, because one expects a company that's been around since 1920 to know how to make great products.

Truth be told, my fictional characters and I swore by that inexpensive ($12.00) PS Auto Pause Coffee Maker day after day since January 20th. Two pots a day, every day, except during the week we were in Florida when (I think) we used a Mr. Coffee.

Tonight at 9:15 (eastern) while the BIG MOON was somewhere out there behind clouds, Sarabande--the protagonist in my novel in progress--and I swore at our Proctor Silex PS Auto Pause Coffee Maker because it just sat the like a bump on a log, like a dog that won't hunt, like one of the huddled masses of other plastic appliances taken to the county dump after a few months of faithful service.

I feel so used. After two, long months of merrily dripping away, my Proctor Silex crapped out. I know what to do when a coffee maker craps out. Boil water in a pan (which is made of metal and has been in the family for 20 years), and pour it through the basket of Maxwell House ground coffee.

Yes, Mr. Proctor and/or Mr. Silex and/or Mr. Hamilton and/or Mr. Beach, I kept the sales slip and the coffee maker instructions, and I read about the warranty. It's good for a year. All I have to do is box up my PS Auto Pause Coffee Maker in a manner that will keep it as safe from harm as an infant in a new car seat and mail it (prepaid and insured) to you for inspection and replacement.

Who are you kidding? The postage will be more than the pot is worth. That, plus the cold turkey withdrawal of NO COFFEE for the for the two to three weeks it takes you to send back a replacement. I don't need tarot cards or the I Ching to tell me I'll be shopping for a coffee maker tomorrow.

Whatever I buy won't last. Today's world is plastic and throw-away as the growing size of our dumps and landfills proves. But coffee is a drug. I've been hooked on it since May 25, 1963, a cold Montana day when I spent the morning shoveling a snowbank the size of a house out of a hotel driveway. The transitory warmth of a steaming white mug of Chase & Sandborn coffee led to a lifetime addiction.

I should have known better, but I was young and immortal then. I thought I knew everything, but I didn't know about all the nights in all the cheap motel rooms with nothing but lousy coffee or all the mornings at truck stops and diners paying for one cup after another; I didn't know that 48 years later, I'd be ready for a dime bag of anything before I'd try to sit here at my desk and write without my drug of choice.

Writers aren't allowed to crap out. We do what it takes to keep our readers supplied with the humor, horror, sex and thrills of books filled with drug-induced words.

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of three coffee-induced novels, "The Sun Singer," "Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey," and "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire."

*Don't even try to convince me that my habit will be well-satisfied by making coffee with one of those contraptions that brews one cup of fru-fru coffee at a time.